Imagine you are the CEO of a company that is on the verge of becoming a global leader in your industry. The only thing keeping your firm from rising to the top is the development of a complex chemical compound that only one person in the world can produce. The problem is, the scientist who created this formula can't be located and seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.
Your staff have been working day and night trying to find this scientist, and so far their efforts have been in vain. Just when you are about to give up hope, there's a knock on your door. An excited researcher bursts into your office, accompanied by someone who looks vaguely familiar to you.
"I found him," your subordinate calls out.
"Where was he?" you ask.
"He's been here the whole time," he answers.
"What do you mean here?" you ask, growing impatient. "Here in this city, here in this country, where?" you demand.
"No, you don't understand," your employee continues. "He was here in our company. He's been working as a clerk in the mailroom for the past five years."
You then turn to the eccentric scientist with a mixture of anger and wonder. "Why didn't you reveal your identity to us?" you ask him.
The scientist, erstwhile mail clerk, looks straight into your eyes and answers, "No one asked me."
While this scenario might seem preposterous, the story serves as an appropriate metaphor for how we, the CEOs of our lives and our fate, allow our overqualified unconscious mind to remain an underachiever and linger at the bottom of the company ladder. We all possess a talented, hardworking unconscious mind that is ready, willing and able to help us design our future and give us virtually anything we want. But instead of utilizing the power of this tremendous resource lying dormant within us, we just allow it to continue to perform such menial (albeit crucial) tasks of monitoring our heart rate, keeping our breathing steady, and maintaining the appropriate level of white blood cells in our system.
We, in turn, rely primarily on our overly analytical conscious mind that gives us thousands of reasons why things won't work. The unconscious mind, on the other hand, is more playful and creative and provides us with millions of reasons why things can and will work faster and better than we think.
What is the reason we don't take advantage of our powerful unconscious mind to serve us? One reason might be that we are simply not aware of the power of our unconscious mind. We generally don't do anything about those things that are out of our thought processes. Perhaps we know about its power and are mindful of its impressive CV, but we don't know how to ask it to help us or what exactly to request of it.
Once we do become aware of the overqualified employee in the mailroom, we can now focus on how to promote our unconscious mind to vice president and work on fleshing out its job description.
One of the amazing things about the unconscious mind is that it is happy to work overtime, 24/7, and will do anything that we ask for as long as it doesn't violate our code of ethics. Our unconscious mind can transcend time by traveling, via the imagination, to the past and the future. This makes it easier for us to visualize positive events happening in the future, and enables us to reframe negative events that happened to us in the past. Like the scientist in the mailroom, our unconscious mind is infinitely skilled and capable: it is only waiting for us to make some requests of it.
The unconscious mind, according to many opinions, has the comprehension level of a sixth-grader. It responds best to simple commands that are stated in the positive. For example, instead of asking our unconscious mind to help us quit smoking, we can ask for its assistance in helping us become a smoke-free person or an individual with clean lungs.
When visualizing a positive outcome in the future, our unconscious mind can easily project us to that future time and act as if the event has already occurred. For example, one can say the following: It is March 21, 2008, and I have defended my master's thesis and have been accepted to a Ph.D. program.
When trying to overcome a trauma from the past, the unconscious mind can take us back to the actual event and help us to shrink down the negative emotions associated with the event, and focus on a positive aspect that the event engendered in our life. Future recollections of that particular dark moment in our life can now be empowering and uplifting instead of disturbing and discouraging.
Once we have developed rapport with our unconscious mind and encouraged it to play an active role on our executive team, we can prepare ourselves for some wonderful changes in our life. Our unconscious mind, now in a position of power and decision-making, can now harness its energy to our benefit, working in harmony with our conscious mind.
With both minds working in tandem, we can reach goals that once seemed impossible to even talk about, much less attain, now that our personal power quotient has grown exponentially. Whether or not we will succeed is no longer the appropriate question. Success is now inevitable. The only question is how much success we want to draw into our lives, now that we are operating with increased capacity. Of course, this question will only be answered after we hire a new mail clerk.
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Ben Goldfarb was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, and is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He moved to Israel in 1988. He divides his time between his yeshiva studies and his coaching practice. His life calling is to help others understand their personal mission and accomplish it with humor, creativity and spirituality. He lives with his wife and children in Jerusalem. His book "Double Feature" will be published in the winter. For more information about his coaching practice, visit the Paradigm Shift Communications website, or send an email to ben@pdshiftcoaching.com. © Copyright 2007 by Ben Goldfarb.
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